NFL Week 1: Using Fantasy Football to Tell Us Something About the Real Game

Something about this past weekend of NFL action just felt off. So I started poking around the numbers. It’s funny that in today’s sporting age, you can get way more descriptive stats and sorting tables about the game on fantasy sites than you can on real life sites.

And it proved to be an interesting lens to examine the game. We get so caught up in exactly what Player X did against Team Y that we don’t step back and realize that these massive databases are actually pretty powerful tools to look at the whole NFL.

Here were a couple of fun things I found.

Last year there were 35 kicks—punts or kickoffs—returned for touchdowns. That’s a little over two per week and, thinking back to last season’s SportsCenter highlights, that seems about right. Any good evening was punctuated by a couple runbacks and over-exaggerated head nodding.

So guess how many there were this week. If you watched any football, you’re probably thinking, “You know, there were a lot, weren’t there.”

Yes, seven of them. Seven kicks returned for touchdowns in one week. That’s ridiculous.

At first I thought, “Geez, the law of averages does shake out in a funny way occasionally.” But then I started thinking more about it and realized: here is a massive effect of the lockout. Anyone that’s played much backyard football knows that one of the easiest (and most fun) plays to score on is a kick run back.

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Without a good kick coverage and proper lane assignments, you can string together enough haphazard blocks and juke moves to go the distance.

NFL teams are not that far removed, in a relative sense, from backyard football right now. Especially special teams. These are the most transient players in the league, the ones who play for four teams in five years.

They really don’t know their assignments.

But then I thought, “Okay, interesting enough, but what about other parts of the game.”

Well, start at the other end of the spectrum. This week we saw twelve quarterbacks throw for over 300 yards, three over 400 and one, Tom “Oh yeah, that’s right, you’re really good” Brady, going over 500 yards (which almost made me lose my fantasy game).

In Week 1 of last year? One 400 yard game and two 300 yard games. Everyone else was sub-300.

Only in Week 10 did we see more than eight 300-yard games and only one of those crested 400. In short, from the offensive side of the ball quarterbacks, early on at least, are preying on unorganized defenses. Again, going back to the backyard football analogy, if both sides are fairly discombobulated (it’s backyard football), it’s going to be a shootout.

Receivers can find a way to slide open and a decent quarterback will find them.

Will this continue? Who knows. Cam Newton is going to still disappoint a lot of people.